Summary: this is good news, because Netrek was shortlisted instead of
discarded.

Your quote was from page 5 of an academic paper, which was based on
research done in 2008.  It isn't bad press.  It isn't even bad academia.
It is an accurate comparison between two very different games.

It is good that Netrek reached their shortlist.  We could have been
omitted much earlier on.  Take that as a positive.

> 1. It had better graphics.

Certainly true.

> 2. It's forums were more active than that of Netrek.

Certainly true.

> 3. Its source code had better readibility.

Netrek source code came from an era where readability was not as
important as it is now.  So it would be surprising to find any current
game with worse readability than Netrek.

> 4. It had versions for various systems-macintosh,windows and linux
> thus offering us greater freedom to choose our base operating system

Certainly true, if you consider only the server.  There were no
published versions of the server for anything except Linux, for example.
Since then a version for Mac OS X was made available.

While I like Netrek and continue to develop, I won't lie about it in the
interests of promotion.  Such a method of advocacy leads to failure.

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/